Managing HyperFlex Stretch Clusters

Overview

You can view do the following for the sites and the witness VM or Invisible Cloud Witness node in a stretch cluster using HX Connect:

  • View the Operational Status and Resiliency Status of the HyperFlex cluster on both the sites and the witness VM or Invisible Cloud Witness node.

  • View the Functional status of the sites and the witness VM or Invisible Cloud Witness node, the IP address of the witness VM, and the status of the Invisible Cloud Witness node. View HX storage cluster system-related information, including node and disk data.

  • Enter/Exit HX maintenance mode.

  • Associate a datastore with one of the sites in a stretch cluster, when creating the datastore.

Monitoring the Health of a Stretch Cluster

You can view the Operational Status and Resiliency Status of the HyperFlex cluster on both the sites and the witness VM or Invisible Cloud Witness node in HX Connect on the Dashboard page.


Important

If you are a read-only user, you may not see all the options available in the Help. To perform most actions in HX Connect, you must have administrative privileges.

Procedure

Step 1

Log into HX Connect.

  1. Enter the HX Storage Cluster management IP address in a browser. Navigate to https://<storage-cluster-management-ip>.

  2. Enter the administrative username and password.

  3. Click Login.

Step 2

On the left navigation pane, click Dashboard.

Step 3

On the Dashboard you can view the following details for the HyperFlex Stretch Cluster:

Displays a status summary of your HX storage cluster for the sites across the Stretch cluster.

UI Element Essential Information

Operational Status section

Provides the functional status and application performance of the HX storage cluster on Site A and Site B.

Provides the functional status and application performance of the witness VM or Invisible Cloud Witness node.

Click Information (Information icon) to access the HX storage cluster name and status data.

Resiliency Health section

Provides the data health status and the ability of the HX storage cluster on Site A and Site B to tolerate failures.

Click Information (Information icon) to access the resiliency status, replication and failure data. This also provides information about data replication compliance, caching device failures tolerable, and device failures tolerable on each node in both the sites.

Capacity section

Displays a breakdown of the total storage versus how much storage is used or free.

Also displays the storage optimization, compression-savings, and deduplication percentages based on the data stored in the cluster.

Nodes section

Displays the number of nodes and the division of converged versus compute nodes across Site A and Site B in the Stretch Cluster.

Hovering over a node icon displays that node's name, IP address, node type, and an interactive display of disks with access to capacity, usage, serial number, and disk type data.

Performance section

Displays an HX storage cluster performance snapshot for a configurable amount of time, showing IOPS, throughput, and latency data.

For full details, see Performance Page.

Cluster Time field

System date and time for the cluster.

Several tables in HX Connect provide one or more of the following three fields that affect the content displayed in the table.

UI Element Essential Information

Refresh field and icon

The table automatically refreshes for dynamic updates to the HX Cluster. The timestamp indicates the last time the table was refreshed.

Click the circular icon to refresh the content now.

Filter field

Display in the table only list items that match the entered filter text. The items listed in the current page of the table are automatically filtered. Nested tables are not filtered.

Type in the selection text in the Filter field.

To empty the Filter field, click the x.

To export content from other pages in the table, scroll to the bottom, click through the page numbers, and apply the filter.

Export menu

Save out a copy of the current page of table data. The table content is downloaded to the local machine in the selected file type. If the listed items are filtered, the filtered subset list is exported.

Click the down arrow to select an export file type. The file type options are: cvs, xls, and doc.

To export content from other pages in the table, scroll to the bottom, click through the page numbers, and apply the export.

Viewing System Information

On the System Information page, you can view HX storage cluster system-related information, including node and disk data. You can also Enter or Exit Maintenance Mode for the sites.

Procedure

Step 1

Log into HX Connect.

  1. Enter the HX Storage Cluster management IP address in a browser. Navigate to https://<storage-cluster-management-ip>.

  2. Enter the administrative username and password.

  3. Click Login.

Step 2

On the left navigation pane, select System Information.

Step 3

Under the System Overview tab you can view the following information for both the sites and the witness VM or Invisible Cloud Witness node:

HX Storage Cluster Configuration Data tab

Displays the basic configuration information the HX storage cluster on the Stretch cluster sites.

Field Description

HX storage cluster field

Name of this storage cluster.

Cluster License Status section

Displays the Register Now link when you log into the HX storage cluster for the first time or till the HX storage cluster license is registered:

Register Now link—To register a cluster license, click this link and provide product instance registration token in the Smart Software Licensing Product Registration screen. For more information on how to get a product instance registration token, refer the Registering a Cluster with Smart Licensing section in the Cisco HyperFlex Systems Installation Guide for VMware ESXi.

Note

 

To register a cluster license, you can also choose Register Cluster from the Actions drop-down field.

License section

  • License Type—Displays Evaluation, Edge, Standard, or Enterprise as the HX storage cluster license type.

  • License Status—Displays one of the following as the HX storage cluster license status:

    • In compliance

    • License expires in <n> days. Cluster not registered - Register Now. (This status appears for Evaluation type license)

    • License expired. Cluster not registered - Register Now. (This status appears for Evaluation type license)

    • Out of compliance - License expired on <date>

    • Out of compliance - Insufficient license

    • Certificate expired—This status appears when ID certificate is not renewed for more than six months.

    • Authentication expired—This status appears when HX is unable to communicate with Cisco Smart Software Manager or Smart Software Manager satellite for more than 90 days.

Note

 

To refresh license certificate or renew license authorization, choose the respective options from the Actions drop-down field.

HX storage cluster status field

Provides functional status of the HX storage cluster in Site A and Site B:

  • Online—Cluster is ready.

  • Offline—Cluster is not ready.

  • Read Only—Cluster is out of space.

  • Unknown—Transitional state while the cluster is coming online.

vCenter link

Secure URL to the VMware vSphere associated with this HX storage cluster. Click the link to remotely access the vSphere Web Client.

Hypervisor field

Hypervisor version installed on this HX storage cluster.

HXDP Version field

Installer package version installed on this HX storage cluster.

Data Replication Factor field

Number of the redundant data replicas stored on this HX storage cluster.

Uptime field

Length of time this HX storage cluster has been online.

Total Capacity field

Overall storage size of this cluster.

Available Capacity field

Amount of free storage in this cluster.

DNS Server(s) field

IP address for the DNS server(s) for this HX storage cluster.

NTP Server(s) field

IP address for the NTP server(s) for this HX storage cluster.

Witness IP Address field

Witness VM: Provides the IP address

Invisible Cloud Witness: Shows the status and (INTERSIGHT)

Step 4

Use Actions list to access the controller VM using SSH as an administrator and perform actions in the following table.

Note

 

Actions to enable or disable SSH can only be performed by domain users, and not local users. Domain users are users in VC (ESXi).

UI Element

Essential Information

Disable Controller Access over SSH

Secure Shell (SSH) is disabled by default.

Register Now

Register your license.

Re-register vCenter

Re-register your license via vCenter

Check Secure Boot Status

Verify your Secure Boot Status

Change Preferred Site

The site designated to serve requests in the event that the connectivity between sites is down.

In the Change Preferred Site window, use the radio button to select the preferred site, and click Update to confirm your selection.

Step 5

Under the Nodes tab, you can view the following information:

Displays data about individual nodes in this HX storage cluster. To see this information in tabular format, go to the Nodes page.

UI Element Essential Information

Node field

Name of a node on this cluster.

Hypervisor Address field

IP address for the management network for this HX storage cluster.

Hypervisor Status field

  • Online

  • Offline

  • In Maintenance

  • In Progress

Controller Address field

IP address of the controller VM on this HX storage cluster.

Controller Status field

Status of the controller VM on this HX storage cluster.

  • Online

  • Offline

  • In Maintenance

  • Healthy

  • Warning

Model field

Physical hardware model number of this node.

Version

Installer package version installed on this node.

Disks field

Number of caching versus persistent disks in this node.

Command Line Mode field

Valid values are: Root shell or Admin shell.

Site

 The site the node belongs to.

Step 6

Under the Disks tab, you can view the following information:

For nodes with disks, an interactive display of disks is included with the following pop-up data:

Table 1. Caching Disks
UI Element Essential Information

Slot Number field

Location of the drive.

Storage Usage field

Percentage of disk storage used.

Status field

  • Claimed

  • Available

  • Ignored

  • Blocked

  • Ok to Remove

  • Unknown

Locator LED

Activates a physical light on the host to help locate a disk; options are On and Off.

Capacity field

Total disk size.

Serial Number field

Physical serial number of this disk.

Version

Disk version

Disk Drive Interface

Describes how the disk is connected. SATA is one example.
Table 2. Persistent Disks
UI Element Essential Information

Status field

  • Claimed

  • Available

  • Ignored

  • Blocked

  • Ok to Remove

  • Unknown

Locator LED action

Activates a physical light on the host to help locate a disk; options are On and Off.

Used / Total Capacity field

Amount of the disk used versus the total disk size.

Serial Number field

Physical serial number of this disk.

Storage Usage field

Percentage of disk storage used.

Version

Disk version

Disk Drive Interface

Describes how the disk is connected. SATA is one example.

Slot Number field

s

Location of the drive.

Type field

Describes the disk type.Values include: Rotational or Solid State.

Usage field

Describes how the disk is being used: Peristent, System, or Cache.

Creating a Datastore

To associate a datastore with one of the sites in a Stretch cluster, do the following:

Procedure

Step 1

Log into HX Connect.

  1. Enter the HX Storage Cluster management IP address in a browser. Navigate to https://<storage-cluster-management-ip>.

  2. Enter the administrative username and password.

  3. Click Login.

Step 2

On the left navigation page, click Datastores.

Step 3

In the work pane, click Create Datastore.

Step 4

Enter a datastore name and capacity.

UI Element Essential Information

Datastore Name field

Enter a unique datastore name for this HX Storage Cluster.

Size field

Enter the quantity of the datastore.

Select the unit of measure. Options are: GB and TB.

Ensure it is sufficient to support the virtual machines in this HX Storage Cluster.

Block Size

Select a block size.

  • 8K—Default

  • 4K

Site Affinity

Select the radio button to associate the datastore with the site.

Step 5

Click Create Datastore to complete the action.

HX Data Platform creates a datastore and mounts it on every node in this HX Storage Cluster.

Shutting a Stretch Cluster Site Down Gracefully

There may be a need to shut a Stretch Cluster site down (for example, when relocating equipment, routine maintenance, site move, site work, failure testing etc.). If you have removed the VMware EAM dependency from your cluster (default in HX 4.0(2b) and later releases), then you can use HX maintenance mode in vCenter or through HX Connect to shutdown the control VMs on each node in a site. When this occurs, the site will shut down gracefully and the guest VMs will failover to the surviving site. You can then also power down ESXi on the nodes if you need to. If EAM is enabled on your CVMs, and you require more information on shutting down a site, see Appendix A in Operating Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform Stretch Clusters.

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Changing the Preferred Site

The preferred site is designated to serve requests in the event that the connectivity between sites is down. You can change the preferred site selection after install from HX Connect by performing the following steps:

Procedure

Step 1

Log into HX Connect

  1. Enter the HX Storage Cluster management IP address in a browser. Navigate to https://<storage-cluster-management-ip>.

  2. Enter the administrative username and password.

  3. Click Login.

Step 2

On the left navigation pane, select System Information.

The preferred site is identified with a badge near the Site Name.

Step 3

Under the System Overview tab you can view the following information for both the sites and the witness node:HX Storage Cluster Configuration Data tab and select Actions from the list.

Step 4

In the Change Preferred Site window, use the radio button to select the preferred site

Step 5

Click Update to confirm your selection.